excerpt: "The urbanization that took almost a century in the West is occurring in a decade or two in China. In 1979, Shenzhen was still a poor fishing village with some 20,000 inhabitants. In 2009, it had a population of 9 million, and income per capita exceeded $13,600, only $3,000 less than in Taiwan or South Korea."

excerpt: "The shifts in the value of a hokou parallels another interesting shift: many migrant workers are returning to their hometowns much earlier. In the previous years, migrant workers would usually return home right before Lunar Chinese New Year, which typically falls in February, but a large number of them have started to return home in December this year. // The driving factor behind this change is that the cost of living in the cities has risen so dramatically over the past few years, and the money migrant workers earn barely covers their living costs. // Although China’s urbanization will likely continue, the patterns might increasingly be to smaller cities and towns. In this sense, China’s development may, sooner than any expected, begin to take on the dispersion pattern that has occurred in the Western countries for more than a half century.

I didn't know of the existence of Pruitt–Igoe until this post. And now, thanks to wikipedia, I know that Pruitt–Igoe

"was a large urban housing project first occupied in 1954 and completed in 1955 in the U.S. city of St. Louis, Missouri".

"The complex was designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, who also designed the World Trade Center towers."

Furthermore, "The Pruitt–Igoe housing project was one of the first demolitions of modernist architecture and its destruction was claimed by postmodern architectural historian Charles Jencks to mark 'the day Modern architecture died'."

This is the promo motion graphic for the World Population Special Series brought by National Geographic (the article here and some pictures here). I couldn't agree more with these two conclusive excerpts:

"But one can also draw a different conclusion—that fixating on population numbers is not the best way to confront the future. People packed into slums need help, but the problem that needs solving is poverty and lack of infrastructure, not overpopulation. Giving every woman access to family planning services is a good idea—“the one strategy that can make the biggest difference to women’s lives,” Chandra calls it. But the most aggressive population control program imaginable will not save Bangladesh from sea level rise, Rwanda from another genocide, or all of us from our enormous environmental problems."

"The number of people does matter, of course. But how people consume resources matters a lot more. Some of us leave much bigger footprints than others. The central challenge for the future of people and the planet is how to raise more of us out of poverty—the slum dwellers in Delhi, the subsistence farmers in Rwanda—while reducing the impact each of us has on the planet."